Milli By Metric

The dining room looks straight at the roaster. Milli By Metric is the Avondale cafe and bakery that Metric Coffee opened in Chicago in September 2025 inside its new roastery, headquarters and retail home, with the cafe at the front of a former 10,000-square-foot antique furniture warehouse and the roasting and baking behind it. Metric has been roasting since 2013, opened its first cafe in 2016 and absorbed the bakery Brite in 2020, and Milli is where those three strands finally share a floor.

Coffee roasted behind the counter, bread baked beside it

The coffee is Metric’s own, with the Probat UG15 still anchoring production. The menu runs freshly roasted single-origin and blended coffees through espresso, batch brew, cold brew and pour over, with Spirit Tea for the non-coffee order. The bar is unusually specific for a neighborhood cafe: a brass-plated Modbar system, two La Marzocco Swan grinders, a Poursteady PS2 automatic pourover machine and a Mahlkönig EK43S.

Food carries equal weight. A culinary director and a head baker run laminated pastry and breakfast cooking, and the case is where it shows: house-made croissants, seasonal cakes, scallion cheddar coffee cake, ube caramel delight, garlic twist, ham and cheese pan suisse, sea salt chocolate chip cookie and fresh sourdough bread.

A room that changes shape through the day

Milli is built to shift rather than to work as a grab-and-go counter: morning coffee, a long lunch, a glass of wine in the evening, and seasonal food that moves with what is good. The building does much of the work. The warehouse conversion is soaring, with brick, wood, stone, plants, tall windows, vertical pillars and inlaid detail. Newly cut skylights bring daylight down into the room, and after dark it is lit by large modern pendants and a 3D-printed fixture made for the space. An adjacent to-go cafe handles quicker pickups as the food program grows.

Start with the flat white and the scallion cheddar coffee cake

If the visit is coffee-led, take a flat white or a straight espresso, or ask for batch brew when the single origin sounds right. The Poursteady handles pour over for a cleaner cup, and cold brew is a fixture on the drinks list.

For food, the scallion cheddar coffee cake is the most specific savory-leaning pick and the one that shows what the bakery is willing to try. From there, move to a croissant, the garlic twist, the ham and cheese pan suisse, a sea salt chocolate chip cookie, the ube caramel delight or a slice of seasonal cake, and take a loaf of sourdough if the bread is out. The reason to linger is that none of it is separated from production: bakery, cafe and roastery run as one visible operation.